


Despite what you've been told

by Pseudothyrum



Category: Mysterious Skin (2005)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Denial, Gen, Horrible Realisations, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-14
Updated: 2013-09-14
Packaged: 2017-12-26 14:30:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/967046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pseudothyrum/pseuds/Pseudothyrum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Neil has some very important beliefs about his past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Despite what you've been told

**Author's Note:**

> Very loosely based on the song Despite What You've Been Told by the Two Gallants.
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eVef-ub44k

Neil closes his eyes and embraces the blackness, breathes steady, and becomes powerful. The hands on his body are an entreaty, worshipful, begging his presence. He is anchored to this place, by hands, and lips on his that taste of blood, but he isn’t in it, wouldn’t be here for all the money in the world. He owns this place but it doesn’t own him; his heart is boxed up in a cardboard shell, preserved in sweetness. He comes to this place, where they make facsimiles of love, and he lets himself pretend he is in a place where he is more than the sum of rented parts. His mistakes pay for bits of skin that they wouldn’t want to keep, and that he can’t really sell. His body was never his own. Its master is gone and cannot be replaced, no matter how hard he tries.

***

Brian’s sobs jam themselves down Neil’s throat until he chokes, and they work their way through his body, poisoning him. He can feel them burning behind his eyes, turning his stomach, and worse, worst of all, they worm their way under his skin, shred the careful cardboard construction of his heart. The sweetness leaches away, devoured by the pit where his soul should have been, where his soul was stolen from him. No, not stolen. He sees it now. He let it go, he let it happen. He loved it, this monstrous thing, and he became it, let it consume him. His skin feels like it’s burning, he longs to peel it off and expose his treacherous veins to the air, to let his filth ooze out between the sinews and the bones, to warn everyone away. He can feel the weight of Brian’s judgement, laid in his lap and at his feet, unspoken words coiling red tape around his lungs, so there is no space left to breathe, no breath left to beg forgiveness, no forgiveness left to be asked and nobody left to give it.

***

Neil closes his eyes and contemplates the blackness, breathes steady, and suffers. The hands on his body are an indictment, accusatory, punishing his presence. This is the only place he can be allowed to be, pavement like cages, streetlights burning their brands into his skin. And it is only his skin. He never belonged to anything, has never been anything more than this. He has a home here in the blackness, this place where sweetness has long gone sour. He begins to doubt that anything was ever truly sweet.


End file.
